CAPE TOWN, Dec 5: Marike de Klerk, the 64-year-old ex-wife of former South African president F.W. de Klerk, was murdered, South African police said on Wednesday, a day after her body was discovered.

“The post mortem found she was strangled and she also had a small stab wound in her back,” Superintendent Wickus Holtzhausen said.

Holtzhausen said De Klerk’s body was found after her hairdresser alerted security guards because she failed to open the door at her luxury Bloubergstrand apartment, just north of Cape Town.

Doctors concluded around 1900 GMT on Tuesday that she had been dead for 36 hours.

“This morning at autopsy we confirm that there were pronounced signs of throttling, with fractures of the little bone in the neck on both sides. We have no doubt that there was severe pressure applied to the neck,” a specialist in the Department of Forensic medicine, Deon Knobel, told SABC public radio.

“We believe that was the sole and exclusive cause of her death,” Knobel said.

Holtzhausen said nothing was missing from her house, there were no signs of a struggle and the motive for the attack was not known.

De Klerk’s former husband was South Africa’s last white president, holding office from 1989 to 1994. During De Klerk’s tenure, his wife’s views sometimes landed her in trouble.

In 1989, she was reported to have described people of mixed blood in South Africa as those “left over” as other nations “got sorted out”.

She also strongly disapproved of her son Willem’s relationship with a women of mixed race. Their relationship ended in 1992.

In 1993, De Klerk won the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela, who followed him as South Africa’s first black leader after democratic elections in the country in April 1994 when the African National Congress came to power.

He served as Mandela’s deputy president until 1996.

De Klerk divorced Marike in 1998 after 39 years of marriage, and admitted to an affair with the wife of a Greek shipping tycoon whom he subsequently married.

De Klerk, 65, was on his way to Nobel Prize centenary celebrations in Sweden when he received news of his former wife’s death.

“I have learned with great shock and sorrow of the circumstances of the tragic death of my former wife Marike,” De Klerk said in a statement on Wednesday, released by his spokesman Dave Steward.

The former president said he would return to South Africa as soon as possible, to be with his two sons Willem and Jan, and his daughter Susan.

“I have made arrangements to return to South Africa as soon as possible to be with my family at this very sad time.”

De Klerk said he hoped the police murder inquiry would bring those responsible to justice as soon as possible.

South African President Thabo Mbeki paid tribute to Marike de Klerk as a strong, charming and dignified woman, after learning of her death on Tuesday.—AFP